The question was whether terrorists should get the privileges the Geneva Conventions grant to honorable combatants. The answer was firm: "We must not, and need not, give recognition and protection to terrorist groups as a price for progress in humanitarian law."

These are the words not of George W. Bush but of the Washington Post. The editors were approvingly quoting Pres. Ronald Reagan, in a 1987 editorial supporting Reagan's refusal to sign "Protocol I," an addendum to Geneva that extended to terrorists the Conventions' ban on the compulsory interrogation of lawful combatants. The New York Times, too, recoiled at the thought of "giving terrorists the status of POWs."

What a difference two decades of journalistic rot make. For the last seven years of war against terrorists, the antiwar Left, using the megaphone of a compliant press, has woven a Bush "torture narrative." As related in the book War by Other Means, by former Justice Department official John Yoo, author of the 2002 DOJ guidance commonly libeled as "the torture memo," it goes like this: "The Bush administration used torture to extract information from al-Qaeda leaders, and decided to use the same methods on the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, whom it deprived of Geneva Conventions protections for precisely this purpose. Harsh interrogation methods became part of military culture and ‘migrated' to Iraq, where they produced the horrible abuses at Abu Ghraib." The tale is a mountain of politicized lies built on kernels of intentional legal ambiguity.

THE RULES OF CIVILIZED WAR

We begin with a brute fact: The barbarism of international terrorism defies the existing system of multilateral treaties and domestic statutes that guide the treatment of captives. In the case of the treaties, this must be so: The animating idea of the Geneva Conventions, adopted in 1949 after the carnage of two world wars, was to civilize warfare. Belligerents opted into the system by conduct. The benefits accorded to lawful combatants (i.e., honorable POWs) included an absolute prohibition against any penalties for resisting interrogation - hence the familiar phrase, only "name, rank, and serial number." But warriors had to earn these benefits by heeding the laws of war: Be part of a regular army, wear uniforms, carry weapons openly, and, most essentially, refrain from endangering civilians.

The Conventions, moreover, were traditional treaties. Geneva benefited neither states that declined to join nor factions ineligible to join because they were not states. And because the parties who did join were sovereign governments, Geneva was to be policed diplomatically; it vested no rights in individual citizens, much less rights enforceable in the judicial courts of member countries.

Global jihadist networks turn such a system on its head. Their modus operandi is to endanger civilians, directly by mass-destruction attacks and indirectly by blending into the population, complicating reprisals. Plus, as non-state actors they are not burdened by obligations that make sovereigns vulnerable: Territorial conquest and economic sanctions are not viable strategies for quelling them.

Two elementary facts follow. First, terrorists cannot opt into Geneva. They fall outside because, by definition, they reject its minimum humanitarian requirements. Affording them Geneva's benefits rewards their savagery and undermines the system's civilizing objectives.

Second, intelligence-gathering is imperative in this war as in no other. Because terror cells defy standard military and diplomatic countermeasures, they can be thwarted only by information: identifying their operatives, hideouts, motivations, targets, and methods. Unless covert agents infiltrate the inner sanctums of terror networks (which is extraordinarily difficult to do), the best source of such intelligence is the interrogation of captured terrorists. Applying the steep Geneva interrogation restrictions reserved for honorable combatants would be suicidal: Life-saving intelligence would be lost and no reciprocal benefit achieved for captured Americans, whom terrorists would torture and kill in any event.

This is the true context of the Bush administration's military response to 9/11. The October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan quickly resulted in many terrorist captures. In February 2002, President Bush determined that al-Qaeda fell entirely outside Geneva. As the de facto government of Afghanistan, the Taliban was within the treaties' general protections; but Taliban fighters did not qualify for POW status because they rampantly violated the laws of war. Still, regardless of status, President Bush ordered that all detainees be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva." These proper directives - more solicitude than our enemies were entitled to - provided wide latitude for intelligence gathering. Existing law forbade torture but permitted subjecting unlawful combatants to aggressive interrogation methods short of torture.

As is now well known, the CIA was authorized to conduct a special interrogation program for high-level Qaeda detainees. It allowed for waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. But use of that tactic was apparently limited to a grand total of three detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda's chief operational planner), and it hasn't been employed in about five years.

At the Defense Department, in December 2002, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized tactics that ramped up interrogation in two stages: Category I included common police methods like yelling and deception; Category II permitted such tactics as isolation, sleep deprivation, clothing removal (not conceived as compelled nudity but as detachment from comfort items), forced grooming, diet alteration (from hot meals to military field rations), exploitation of phobias (such as the presence, but not threatening use, of dogs), and stress positions (such as standing for four hours).

Also proposed was a Category III menu that would require commander approval. Rumsfeld, however, assented to only one of its measures: mild, non-injurious physical contact (grabbing, poking, or light pushing). He declined to authorize waterboarding, scenarios creating a fear of imminent death or pain, and exposure to cold weather or water.

Like the president, Rumsfeld was emphatic that all interrogation be humane. Furthermore, when Defense Department lawyers protested - instinctively fearing that enhanced tactics would imperil captured U.S. personnel - Rumsfeld quickly rescinded all the harsh techniques and ordered a more detailed study. In April 2003, revised guidance suggested 26 general techniques, only two (blindfolding and light, non-injurious touching) involving any physical contact. Also proposed were nine "exceptional" methods, mostly tactics listed in Category II of the original 2002 guidance. Rumsfeld, however, rejected the two general tactics calling for physical touching, and of the exceptional tactics approved only one: isolation, limited to 30 days. That's it. As Yoo recounts, no dogs, touching, slaps, sleep deprivation, stress positions, or forced calisthenics.

The blunt truth is that none of the administration-approved tactics constituted torture. In actuality, these security measures are commonsense matters of life and death, and we need to let our laws about them be guided by common sense.

PARTISAN MYTH-MAKING

The creators of the torture narrative refuse to take this view. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in spring 2004, human-rights activists, international-law professors, and opportunistic politicians bludgeoned Americans with an indictment of their government as a torture regime. It counted for nothing that it was the military itself that first disclosed the abuse, that Bush had ordered full Geneva protections for Iraqis, that the miscreant soldiers were prosecuted, and that a bipartisan panel rejected the absurd claim that Bush had installed a prisoner-abuse program. (The same panel recounted that less than one-tenth of one percent of 50,000 detainees in the War on Terror had viable abuse claims - extraordinarily low by historical warfare standards.)

Was the Bush administration a terror regime? Americans rejected this slander in November 2004. But the Left continues assiduously to blur the lines between torture, lesser forms of abuse, and the routine pressure and anxiety that are hallmarks of any effective interrogation.

Our law reserves the designation torture for what a federal appeals court has described as practices causing "intense, lasting, and heinous agony" - acts so abominable they stand apart from other condemnable forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (CID). By contrast, the human-rights activists behind the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT) confounded these distinctions, barring torture and CID as if they were the same thing. The U.S. rejected this conflation.

When UNCAT was ratified in 1994, the U.S. accepted its torture proscriptions in full. Congress duly enacted laws that criminalized torture, narrowly defining it as physical or prolonged mental abuse that was severe. But the CID provisions were not accepted: They were impossibly vague, with terms like degrading treatment portending frivolous abuse claims. So treaty reservations were adopted, reducing CID to nothing more than conduct that was already illegal under U.S. law.

The U.S. was remaining true to Geneva's principles - but the terrorist onslaught, marinated in Bush Derangement Syndrome, intoxicated the leftists into betraying those principles. The Left now insists that no one, not even terrorists bent on killing as many Americans as possible, can be confined to a "legal black hole." If Geneva's civilizing standards excluded the barbarities of jihadism, the fault had to lie with the standards, not the barbarities. And since progressives view existing law as organic and endlessly pliable, voilà! - international prisoner-treatment standards could instantly be morphed into a terror-friendly chimera.

Thus did Democrats and John McCain grandstand shamefully over Abu Ghraib. Thus did the same opportunists blithely portray waterboarding as torture even though Congress, despite many opportunities, declined to make it illegal. And thus did a sharply divided Supreme Court, in the 2006 Hamdan case, have to abuse the language of Geneva's Common Article 3 (CA3) - which by its own terms applies only to civil wars - in order to extend its vague guarantees of humane treatment to the international conflict with al-Qaeda.

The torture narrative frames the key developments of the War on Terror as the systematic implementation of a torture regime. The best exemplar is British law professor Philippe Sands's Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law, now heralded by leading Democrats as the definitive history. Perfecting the now-familiar script, Sands equates aggressive tactics with cruelty and cruelty with torture. He falsely claims that Rumsfeld authorized the Category III tactics even though the secretary not only rejected them but never wavered from mandating humane treatment. And Sands grossly misreports the account of key player Douglas Feith, then undersecretary of defense for policy. Sands writes that Feith advocated the denial of all Geneva safeguards, specifically including CA3 protections. Upon being challenged by Feith during congressional hearings, Sands finally released the recording of their interview, which conclusively proved Sands guilty of brazen distortions: Feith had favored Geneva protections; he'd denied only that terrorists were entitled to honorable prisoner-of-war status (a proposition even Sands did not dispute). And, in the entire lengthy interview, Sands had never even raised the matter of CA3 - despite its centrality to his claims of Bush's systematic, lawless detainee abuse.

Such distortions are required because the torture narrative is a smear. Feith and Yoo are exceptional among the implicated former officials because they've demanded public scrutiny and the separation of fact from fiction. Theirs are lonely voices as the Left writes the history. That's tragic. The Bush administration got the security right: The intelligence haul from terrorist interrogations has been invaluable and has helped keep the nation safe from attack. The president, however, got the politics all wrong: clumsily paying lip service to the Left's torture rhetoric while sidestepping it in practice - shrinking from a full-throated defense of aggressive but humane interrogation tactics on the dubious ground that mounting one would enable terrorists to train against it.

The result is a double failure, of great consequence: We are saddled with a torture narrative that is far more a libel than a reality, and we have failed to reshape domestic and international law into tools that work against terrorists, rather than for them.